Friday, February 16. 2007
 Good old Moonbattery informed us about HR 254, sponsored by the esteemed Shirley Jackson-Lee. HR 254 proposes to create federal "hate crimes."
HR 254 is creepy. The bill fits right in with the Cultural Marxism piece posted yesterday. What makes it worse to assault someone for their sexual proclivities than to assault someone just because you hate their guts? The proposed bill, as Moonbattery points out, could be extended to "hate speech" laws, such as they endure in Europe. For the record, we hate this bill, and we hate the perennially enraged Shirley for having the horrible, oppressive, and idiotic idea. Furthermore, we will hate anything and anybody we feel like, and we will happily say so until someone hauls us off for regrooving.
Thursday, February 15. 2007
I wish one of us had written this piece. Cultural Marxism, by Kimball at Am. Thinker. A quote: Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America. They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity. All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.
Read it all. It gives the history of almost everything we view as subversive and destructive to the values we hold dear. I am just not sure how Freud fits into this, though.
 Everybody is linking to this piece, Protector of the Free World Deserves Better, by Albrechtson in the Australian. One quote:
Anti-Americanism has less to do with US politics and policies and more to do with what Markovits calls the "perfectly respectable human need to hate the big guy". Half a century ago, Hannah Arendt commented on the same psychology of mistrust aimed at the US. It was, she said, the inevitable plight of the big, rich guy to be alternately flattered and abused, remaining unpopular no matter how generous they were.
So will they love us if our economy shrinks towards the catastrophe of France, and we shut down our military? And why should we care? Those arrogant Europeans should be reading Maggie's if they want to learn about evil, ignorant, uncivilized, oafish, boorish, disgusting Americans.
Wednesday, February 14. 2007
Friends of Maggie's Farm have given us exclusive inside photos of the exhaustive -- and we daresay, exhausting--interview process that the son of the south uses when trying to find people from one America ready, willing, and able to savagely attack the other America without them noticing. Our old pal Iowahawk has the resume of one of the last sterling candidates for the job. You can read it here, if you're not faint of heart when hearing strong Anglo-Saxon words.
Tuesday, February 13. 2007
 So Mookie's decided to boogie all the way to Iran.
Apparently the real Surgin' General is named Petraeus.
Classical Values found this at Google. Be very very afraid! Those who remember recent political history know that this was done to Eisenhower (stupid), Goldwater (evil and stupid), Nixon (evil), Ford (stupid), Reagan (evil and stupid), and GW (evil and stupid). Gee, such a nuanced strategery.
 Read this mention at Derbyshire about Nick Cohen's new book (discussed in the past here). Derbyshire noted that Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling believes that the Left has plenty left to offer. Dillow accuses the Left of squandering opportunities and ideas, and of confusing statism with socialism.
Well, I enjoy reading Dillow regularly, but there is little he says with which I could agree. He is openly utopian which, for me (although I like Dillow from what I can tell) indicates a great misunderstanding of human nature, especially its "dark side," which afflicts poor, middle, and wealthy equally. Dillow's notions, like those of Labour, lead to situations such as this: 1/3 Britons now derive over 50% of their income from welfare and the dole (at Tangled Web). Extend that further? To 100%? So who is "greedy"? Indeed, who is truly greedy? Those who want to achieve, or those who want support from others? For me, that would be the utopia of a serf on an estate, or of a cow in a barn. Dillow has no faith in people, it would seem to me, to find their own paths through life, and so I feel his utopianism is basically elitist and condescending. (My view tends towards the notion that Socialism, in practice, is Feudalism in new clothes and with new excuses.) And I will answer one question posed by Mr. Dillow, who asked, "why, if a centrally planned economy is a stinking idea, should a centrally planned company be a good one?" Because: 1. Government enforces its wishes with guns and jails, and corporations do not.
2. Government planning has failed catastrophically everywhere it has been tried, and has diminished human freedom at the same time. Examples of successful business planning abound in the world: it's a lot easier to try to understand one market that to try to understand every world market in product and labor.
3. Government does not need to compete to survive, but business has to. Monopolies do not work very well: they of necessity stifle growth and innovation and rapid adaptation.
4. Government has a near-endless supply of revenue collected at the end of a gun. Businesses' revenue only comes when they make things or do things people voluntarily want.
5. Government is a sponge for power over people, and that sort of power is a zero-sum game. Corporations only want to make money, so they are relatively harmless. Wealth is not a zero-sum game.
6. Bureaucrats who plan things in government have the 180 degree wrong incentive structure, and are of famously lower quality that those in the private sector. Furthermore, no planner can be as wise as markets - and we know what happens when governments think they are smarter than markets. You drive subsidized Yugos. How many theoreticians have run a successful enterprise?
7. Government's rationality and effectiveness is distorted by political contingencies. Government planners would be instructed to keep a buggy-whip factory open to save a few jobs in somebody's district. A business would adapt, and the workers would go find something else.
8. Government planners would be risk-averse. Business is risk-savvy.
9. There are no meaningful incentives in government businesses. As they said in Poland after they threw out the socialists: "We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us." They also said, "Now we have rich, middle, and poor. Before, we were all poor, except the government." And, lastly and most importantly, 10: Freedom. Economic freedom, risk-taking, failure, choice, etc. is so fundamental to the freely-chosen life of a free man that no bowl of lentils, no matter how tasty, should have the power to buy off part of his soul and his dignity so he can stand in a warm barn. Voluntary serfdom: Not a credit to the human spirit. Today, government builds and maintains the roads on which capitalism can drive. Give the government the steering wheel too, and they can control everything in your life. That would be a morally very bad thing even if it could be done successfully - and they would want to lock me up for having a social-psychiatric ailment like "Independence Disorder" or "Ambition Disorder.". Mr. Dillow, the need for socialist measures is done. We have enough of them: No-one freezes, no-one starves, people get the education they need, the medical treatment the government planners want them to have, and they can spend their life on the dole for a sore back if they want to. Many, many votes have thus been bought already. And this is all thanks to the transfer of money from capitalism's miracle of wealth-creation, the miracle of markets and market incentives, to the non-producing but ever-arrogant parasitic government. Yes, socialism is alive in all Western nations in hundreds of government redistribution programs, but we have had enough of it. No more required. Material needs have been met. Leave the rest - the pursuit of happiness and dignity and self-respect - to the people. No-one can confer these things of the spirit on anyone else: find out what people are capable of if not treated like imbeciles and cripples by a condescending, vote-buying government.
Monday, February 12. 2007
 Vaclav Klaus. Gotta love the guy. Why do we have such pussy-footing politicians?
Checked his bio: an economist and an academic. So I could also say "Why do we have to have such pussy academics?" A quote from the interview at Drudge: Environmentalism as a metaphysical ideology and as a worldview has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or with the climate. Sadly, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Still, it is becoming fashionable and this fact scares me. The second part of the sentence should be: we also have lots of reports, studies, and books of climatologists whose conclusions are diametrally opposite. Indeed, I never measure the thickness of ice in Antarctica. I really don't know how to do it and don't plan to learn it. However, as a scientifically oriented person, I know how to read science reports about these questions, for example about ice in Antarctica. I don't have to be a climate scientist myself to read them. And inside the papers I have read, the conclusions we may see in the media simply don't appear.
and: Q: How do you explain that conservative media are skeptical while the left-wing media view the global warming as a done deal?
A: It is not quite exactly divided to the left-wingers and right-wingers. Nevertheless it's obvious that environmentalism is a new incarnation of modern leftism.
Klaus is a dangerous tennis player too. Our new hero.
 Rudy Giuliani rose to prominence as a US Attorney going after white collar, mainly high-visibility Wall Street "crime". No doubt this was part of his political plan (nothing wrong with that), EXCEPT that his famous prosecutions which won him the Mayoralty of NYC (which is a bigger and sharper-elbowed organization than many state governments in the US) ended in reversals after years of appeal - after ruining countless lives and careers and marriages, including some folks I knew.
His career was built on fear. When the US Attorney decides to target you, good legal advice is to get down on your knees and pray, because once they have invested some time and money in you, they will be highly motivated to find some way hurt you, no matter what. Thus, around NY, he is viewed as dangerously ruthless and calculating. Maybe fight fire with fire, and run him against the ruthlessly calculating Hillary. Nice people. His case against Michael Milken was the most famous of many. People forget that Milken never broke any existing known laws other than the law against getting rich. No, new theories, versions and extensions of law were invented for Rudy's prosecutions. Milken, a financial genius and, in my opinion, probably an honest man, spent two years in jail for nothing. And now his invention, Junk Bonds, are a major capital market, fueling all sorts of growth in our economy. Rudy is a likeable, charismatic fellow, a true conservative, and he did us all the favor of rescuing NYC from the mess it was in long before the WTC. At the time, the newspapers had been saying that NYC was ungovernable. I would vote for him against any Dem, but I do not respect him. I suspect that he has the heart of a Brooklyn thug. I still feel upset about the lives he destroyed. Maybe that's just politics, life in the big city, etc., but I'd rather not think so. He of course also deserves credit for his handling the attack on New York, but I swould have expected nothing less of him and would never imagine him going Nagin. Still, his real achievement was bringing Democratic NYC back from decay and anarchy via conservative principles, firmness, persistence, and good cheer. If you haven't been to NYC recently - go, and see what Rudy - and now Bloomberg - have accomplished. For the whole story of his Wall Street prosecution days, the Journal of Libertarian Studies has an excellent summary. (I forget how to quote from PDF files.)
 Time for another. Perhaps the discussion in the world is beginning to change to something more real and less hysterical.
Nigel Calder blames Mr. Sun. So do we. He is worried about the sun returning to normal, and chilling us. Also, Flares has a fine selection of pieces on the subject: "Deniers." The Czech President has a great interview on the subject, here. He says it straight - smart guy. Meanwhile, Moonbat enviros protest Valentine flowers. Image: A palm which has sprung up in a park in downtown Rangeley, ME this past week.
Politics rarely seems to deal in fact. It prefers sentiment and distortion, which can be manipulated. Jay Tea has a piece on Minimum Wage with which we totally agree. As we have said, it's all about the unions.
Sunday, February 11. 2007
 Because recycling is stupid and ignorant. This fact is widely known, but it's heretical to say outloud. Recycling has become a sacred cow. Penn and Teller tell it like it is, as usual (h/t, LGF).
No, it's beyond stupid - it's a rip-off. Except for aluminum cans, not only is it a fraud, but it makes Iron Eyes Cody cry because recycling hurts Gaia. But people want easy ways to feel virtuous, which is "nice" but not always wise. But don't take that simple pleasure away from them, right? Even if it wastes oil to recycle? And costs them money - for nothing? Pure self-deception. But people will do anything easy to feel self-satisfaction. The only thing that benefits from recycling are the garbage companies that feed off the government subsidies. It's about the same sort of genius concept as biofuels, which require more energy to produce than they contain - and raise the price of staples in poor parts of the world, and destroy forests by subsidizing non-market-based farming in sensitive areas. But it does take money from the Middle East and from Chavez, which is good. I am going to buy a hybrid, but not to please the Greenies. I will put a bumper sticker on it: Drive a Hybrid: Take a Bomb from a Moslem. Or maybe: Screw Chavez: Drive a Hybrid. Or maybe both. To deprive these folks of income is the least I can do for the earth.
Re-posted from June, 2005 This is a lengthy (14 p), scholarly, reflective essay on the history and evolution of modern conservative thinking from the 1930s to the present. A quote from a section on marriage: The contract tradition’s reduction of human beings to autonomous individuals fosters a self-conception that destabilizes the marriage bond; the welfare state then “lubricates” exit from marriage with various substituting benefits. Love, it has been said, is the willingness to belong to another. There is really no place for such love in a world of autonomous individuals bristling with rights — the world which liberalism understands as “natural.” The popularity of a therapeutic language of “fulfillment” in contemporary America only exacerbates the weak institutional support that liberal jurisprudence provides for marriage. Traditional religious marriage ceremonies often included a prominent discussion of sacrifice, not a concept with ready appeal to autonomous individuals. Traditional conservatives tend to see marriage as entering into a status, rather than concluding a contract, and they would like to see this reflected in culture, law, and public policy. Thus, they look with approbation on movements such as Promise Keepers which work to shape popular culture in a family-friendly way. They would repeal the no-fault divorce revolution if they could — and indeed, some Catholic traditionalists would prefer the laws of marriage which prevailed until recently in several Latin American countries where divorce was effectively impossible. The experiment with “covenant marriages” is viewed as a step forward, but a very small one. Traditionalists also favor significantly shifting tax burdens from families to the single and childless. Again, Bush’s increased child tax credits are a small step forward.
A concluding quote: In the end, it is perhaps that most eccentric of American thinkers, the nineteenth-century Catholic convert Orestes Brownson, who provides us with the intellectual tools for grappling with the American experience. As Peter Augustine Lawler observes in his exceptionally valuable introduction to a new edition of The American Republic, Brownson’s teaching is that the American regime is the greatest political achievement since Rome. But it is not the city laid up in heaven. Like every achievement within the saeculum, its justice is limited and it is mortal. The sun will set too on the era of American exceptionalism. When it does, those who have placed their fondest hopes in the promises of ideological politics may feel themselves dispossessed and demoralized; but those who have hearkened to the teachings of the traditionalists may find themselves, at last, at home.
Read entire in New Pantagruel
Their video at Jawa Report. It's a good take on the ignorance of the Greenies - and the take-over of the environmental movement by the politically-motivated.
Saturday, February 10. 2007
We were going through the cut-out record bin this weekend and found this oldie but goodie. It makes great listening while reading Pajamas Media's roundup of reax to the John Edwards decision to be faithful to those that malign the faithful while maligning the malignant maligning they faithfully malign with. Or something. 
Friday, February 9. 2007
 I bundled up tonight in my old, green, moth-holed wool hunting sweater, and went out after dinner and sat on a frosty lawn chair by the tarp-covered pool, southwest of good old Hartford, with the river chortling in the cool, dim Yankee distance, with the hoot owls hooting far, far off over the hill (What owl, Bird Dog? Hoo, hoo, hoo), and drank a very tall, straight-up, weather-cooled Laphroaig while smoking a delicious Cohiba (sorry, Fidel-haters - I hate him too but I am a sucker for an illegal cigar). Only about a balmy 34 degrees outside. Paradise.
Maybe it's my age that led my thoughts to Social Security - not that it will make any difference in my personal life. But it dawned on me why the Dems are so fiercely opposed to private investment of personal Social Security accounts - even as little as 5%. Of course, we know there is no such thing as personal SS accounts - there is no money there. And of course, the Dems do not want to do anything to risk their Ponzi scheme which would be illegal if any private enterprise tried to build it. But what I realized was this: Even a tiny % of SS investment would make it possible for all Americans, voluntarily, to become investors. Every household could have a stake in the free markets! God forbid - the pathetic Great Unwashed McDonalds-eaters we care so much about - in our markets? The proletariat, become filthy capitalists? No, no, no: they should know their place. The US is well above 50% financial market investors already. Anything higher would create a solid majority with a stake in a capitalist economy, beyond their participation in their daily work. That is the Socialist's nightmare. They cannot tolerate the notion of the proletariat, who are supposed to be on their plantation, checking the price of their GE, Exxon, Apple - and their Heinz. Why? Because how can government take from private enterprise, and over-regulate private enterprise, when a strong majority of folks are invested in it? The Left cannot tolerate wealth-building amongst the proletariat, because it reduces their dependency on the State. Same reason they support death taxes. (They tolerate it quite well amongst themselves, however - but they are different, because "they care".) That's my insight. Blame it on the Laphroaig. Or on Mr. Moon. Good night, moon. Editor's comment: See comments, but this is the all-American Mr. Great Horned Owl. Typically 3-5 deep hoots. A wonderful creature and a terrifying predator, if you are a weak small animal. Known to take skunks, cats, and young raccoons. Often heard, rarely seen.
 Maggie's Farm, always on the cutting edge of environmental matters, brings you exclusive coverage of California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine announcing he would propose a bill to ban the use of incandescent bulbs in his state. The dim, milky, expensive ones filled with exotic, dangerous gases that require recycling are just as good, and sometimes even come on and emit light-like waves before I crack my shin on the coffee table or before I'm done in the bathroom -- if it's Number 2.
Lloyd is undoubtedly a tireless steward of the environment, and Maggie's Farm is sanguine that he's used the magical powers bestowed upon all state legislators, by virtue of getting several thousand government union workers and extended family members to pull a lever for them every once in a while, to foresee all the various ramifications of outlawing an item that...let's face it... no one much uses any more anyway. I think that's Lloyd on the right there. No, that's a potted plant. My bad. I'm sorry, is that your foot?
China finds itself in a moral and spiritual vacuum, while its economy soars and "relative" freedoms grow. What else is growing in China? Christianity, especially among the better-educated. After two generations of state-worship and Mao-worship, perhaps their hunger for higher things hasn't been eliminated. A quote from a book review in Trinity Forum, What to make of China? Jesus in Beijing introduces a wild card into traditional analyses of China: the growth of its Christian church. Most people outside church circles would consider this topic incidental to the “main” events of economics and politics. Yet growth of the church, particularly in urban areas among highly educated people, is reaching the point where it could begin to influence the tilt of government decisions in the future. This is significant because the institutions that form the bedrock of our global world—democracy, capitalism, free trade, and global financial markets—are in and of themselves morally neutral. They are organizing principles that derive their present moral force from the faith and beliefs of Western civilization. China and the rest of the non-Western world have generally accepted these institutions and their moral anchors because of the dominance of the West. They are playing by the current rules, but they are not necessarily following their own moral beliefs.
Thursday, February 8. 2007
VDH, in City Journal. A quote:  Fast-forward nearly five years, and the national climate has radically changed, so much so that the arguments of Mexifornia—close the borders, return to the melting pot, offer earned citizenship to most aliens of long residence in exchange for acceptance of English and American culture—seem tame today, if not passé. In 2002, when I wrote the original City Journal essay, no one thought that the U.S. Congress would vote to erect a wall. Today there is rumbling that the signed legislation entails only 700 miles of fencing instead of spanning the entire 1,950-mile border. Deportation was once an unimaginable response to the problem of the 11 million here illegally. Now its practicality, rather than its morality, appears the keener point of contention. And the concerted effort by Chicano activists to drive from popular parlance the descriptive term “illegal alien” in favor of the politically correct, but imprecise and often misleading “undocumented worker” has largely failed. Similar efforts to demonize opponents of open borders as “anti-immigrant” or “nativist” have had only a marginal effect in stifling debate, as has the deliberate effort to blur illegal and legal immigration. The old utopian talk of a new borderless zone of dual cultures, spreading on both sides of a disappearing boundary, has given way to a reexamination of NAFTA and its facilitation of greater cross-border flows of goods, services—and illegal aliens and drugs. So why has the controversy over illegal immigration moved so markedly to the right?
One question for VDH: Why is this "to the right"? I do not understand how "left" and "right" apply to illegal immigration. "Illegal" is not a matter of opinion. The law is not complicated on this subject.
 Leave science to the scientists. American Thinker. Of course, the UN Report hasn't been released yet - they are fiddling with the real data until May. Why? Boston Globe. (h/t, Viking)
I suspect someday we will confirm that much climate variation is based on solar radiation. Coyote. Makes sense, since the ice is melting on Mars, and Jupiter is getting more stormy. In the meantime, climate change may become a hate crime - against Eskimos! Why is the Climate Change thing such a bandwagon for the UN and other governments, and for the Left? Because it's an excuse for a money and power grab - whether it's true or not. Pure and simple. It is only rational to be skeptical about such hysterias, because they have always proved to be wrong in the past. But, as we've said, we don't care whether it gets colder or warmer - we can cope. I always try to remember the #1 rule of political power: Trump up a crisis, then offer to solve it. No, insist on solving it: "We can do better." Just consider: Have we ever heard (except for Reagan and Maggie Thatcher) governments offer solutions which reduce government power? Image: Bad, bad Mr. Sun
 Via Hot Air. My views have changed since college, but I'm not so certain about hers. (Grammar Help Desk: Does that "hers" take an apostrophe somewhere, or not?)
If she can say things like this, one must wonder. More worrisome, I think, is that she can say things like that and not be crucified by the press and the voters.
Wednesday, February 7. 2007
Why won't Bush et al push nuclear energy? Forget global warming - it's the only sure and cheap path to energy independence. Piece at American.com Blacks and Hispanics lag in educational achievement. LaShawn takes a look at immigration, self-help, culture, etc. and how these variable affect education. Links to some good stuff. A quote: Back in the day, immigrants flocked to the United States, ready, willing, and able to become assimilated, English-speaking Americans. They prized not only America’s opportunities but what America symbolized. These immigrants didn’t just want a good job or higher standard of living. They wanted to be productive and proud Americans. Today’s “immigrants,” mostly from Central America, have no such ambitions. They come to the U.S. for the employment opportunities and to take advantage of America’s social services. They know what suckers we are for the “disadvantaged,” and they use our own generosity and laws against us. Not only are illegal aliens pouring across the border, they’re reproducing at higher rates than the native population. Since the federal government is uninterested in carrying out immigration law, illegal aliens are here to stay. This new wave of “immigrants” is uneducated, poor, lacks good English-speaking skills, has disproportionately higher rates of out-of-wedlock births and crime. While black Americans have the convenient white boogeyman to point to as the cause of all their troubles, illegal aliens aren’t really complaining or blaming anyone for anything. At least not yet.
Hating Horatio, by Dr. Jack Wheeler in Free Republic. It begins thus: Ancient Rome's greatest historian was Titus Livius, known to us as Livy (59 BC-17 AD). In the Second Book of his monumental history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City), he tells the famous story of Horatio at the Bridge. In 510 BC, Rome was threatened with destruction from an invading army of Etruscans. All Romans living in the countryside had abandoned their homes and fled for protection inside the city. The city walls were heavily garrisoned, but the most vulnerable point was a wooden bridge, the Pons Sublicius, across the river Tiber and into Rome. When Etruscan forces focused their attack on the bridge, the Roman troops guarding it fled in fear - save for one man, a soldier named Horatius, whom we call Horatio.
Read the whole thing - it's about Iraq and Bush.
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